Well. Am finally feeling up to writing, so I can finally fill in some details of the surgery. Still get a bit dizzy when I read, which makes me nauseated, so it may take a while to actually type this.
So. Day of the surgery, I was scheduled at 1:45, which meant that I couldn’t eat all morning. We got there and they were behind, so I didn’t actually get into the operating room until about 3:30. They’d also forgotten to tell me that they were also going to do a uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UPPP), which involves cutting away part of my uvula and soft pallate to get rid of extra tissue. It was a rather mild one, though, because according to the internet, it usually takes about an hour and involves an overnight stay, and my surgery only took 15 minutes. Anyway, that added some more pain. I woke up feeling pretty awful. I threw up as soon as we got home, and then again at about midnight. Stayed in my room rather than joining the crowd in the family room.
Next day threw up twice. Stayed in my room almost all day, sleeping on and off. Drank a lot of Gatorade and ate a little raspberry sherbet.
On Wednesday I took a shower, which wiped me out so completely that I slept the whole rest of the day. Had more sherbet and drank more Gatorade. Didn’t throw up at all.
Thursday got a very high fever– over 102. Drank as much as I could, took some Tylenol and got the fever down. Was NOT a fun day.
Friday and Saturday and Sunday are all blurring together in my mind. Must not have had anything distinctive happen.
Monday, got the hiccups. 3 times. It hurt a *lot*. I was actually doing pretty good that morning, but my first batch of hiccups made me so weak it wrecked the rest of the day. Tried to read a little, but made myself so nauseous I ended up throwing up that night.
Yesterday, my soft palate area was so tender from my hiccups that I was pretty miserable. Couldn’t eat or drink much of anything, even the Macaroni Grill that mom bought for lunch, or the chicken that Dad grilled that night.
This morning, went to the doctor to get a check up. He says I’m actually healing pretty well, and that I won’t hate him very much longer. He gave me a prescription for the nausea. The pain has gone down quite a bit, but I still get nauseous when I try to read. I just took my prescription, so I hope it’ll get better.
I keep getting cravings for food I can’t eat. Like a thick, juicy steak. Or chocolate almond clusters from Costco. Pecan Sandies. French Fries. Grilled chicken sandwich from East Coast Subs. Darn. I’m hungry.
One of my regular blog readers, Laura, sent me this. I laughed my head off.
Top 30 List of “You Know You’re a Harry Potter Fanatic When….”
1. You refer to other people as “Muggles.”
And this is a bad thing?
2. You search your garden for gnomes.
3. You take your broom outside and say “UP!” until you get tired.
4. You go to King’s Cross-station on Sept. 1 and watch for Hogwarts students.
5. You break both arms trying to get to platform 9 3/4.
6. You know more about Quidditch than any actual, real-life sport.
I’m not much for most sports (except football), so this is probably pretty accurate.
7. You talk about Harry Potter so much that your friends are either sick of hearing about it or they finally read they books and become Harry Potter fans as well.
Guilty. But I think I’ve converted more people than I drive crazy.
8. You read the books out loud to yourself in a British accent.
Oh, come one, it’s so fun!
9. You spend 10 hours a day writing e-mails and such for Harry Potter message boards and RPGs.
So?
10. You go into withdrawal if you haven’t visited something Harry Potter related in the past 1 hour.
So I check the Leaky Cauldron every 15 minutes. This is bad?
11. You go to the a movie you don’t really want to see just for the H.P. trailer.
I’ve never actually done this, but I have considered it.
12. Every time your computer says, “You’ve got mail” you run outside, looking for owls.
13. Every little thing reminds you of something in Harry Potter.
We were watching Anne of Avonlea, and my dad remarked “Jen Pringle has Hermione hair.” It’s everywhere, I tell you!
14. You can recite passages from the books by heart.
Can’t everyone?
15. You frequently dare people: “Come on, quiz me, quiz me on HP!”
Never gotten one wrong yet.
16. You KNOW the title of the seventh book.
17. You’ve been arrested (more than once) for breaking into Mrs. Rowlings¹ house and searching for the last paragraph of HP 7. (She says it would be a disaster if it were published. I wonder what it contains?)
18. You say a password before entering your house.
I don’t now, but I will from now on. Great idea!
19. You say “Lumos” before you turn on the lights.
Ditto on this one.
20. Whenever someone uses the phrase “you-know-who,” you instinctively think “Voldemort.”
Every single time.
21. You have a cat named Crookshanks, a rat named Scabbers or Wormtail, a lizard named Norbert, and a dog named Fluffy, Snuffles, or Padfoot.
No, but I have a car named You-Know-Who, a stuffed monkey named Gilderoy, a stuffed elephant named Albus, a stuffed dog named Dobby and three stuffed cats named Hermione, Ginny and Angelina, an HP destop named Harry and a notebook named Ginny. And more that I can’t think of now.
22. You go to the zoo and try to speak to the boa constrictor.
23. You made Butterbeer and served it to your friends
24. You tried to make Pumpkin Juice.
I’ve thought about it.
25. You’ve taken a pencil, pointed it to the television remote, & shouted: “Accio Remote,” becoming disapointed when it wouldn’t come.
Well, I don’t get dissapointed, but I do pretend to summon things all the time.
26. You seriously think about which Harry Potter character you could play in the movie, and memorize all their lines.
No, but I have taken on a persona from the books. 
27. You’re an American and you start using Britishn slang terms like “git,” “bloody,” “nutters,” and “prat.”
So? What’s wrong with that? The British have much better slang than we do, anyway.
28. Your first question to every new person you meet is, “Have you read the Harry Potter series?” If they have, you’d just made a new best friend & if not, your opinion of them falls drastically.
Any guy I date has to either have read them and enjoyed them or be willing to read them. I refuse to marry anyone who doesn’t like Harry. We wouldn’t have enough in common.
29. You’ve stayed up all night reading HP FanFics.
Several times.
30. You think the next 23 days are going to be the longest in your life!!
Can’t. Wait. Can’t. WAIT!!!
21 out of 30. As my dad would say, I’m over the top.
6 responses so far ↓
1 laura // May 28, 2003 at 5:56 pm
Laughter is the best medicine isn’t it?
Glad you liked it.
2 Leslie // May 28, 2003 at 6:14 pm
Glad you’re feeling better. I have practically the same reaction to the ones you commented on, except I stopped asking people to quiz me when I beat all the little kids at a Halloween HP party 2.5 years ago. They were not impressed.
3 Lou // May 28, 2003 at 9:55 pm
OMG…I’ve got to go to the loo now because that was bloody briliant!!! I’m printing it off…better yet, Leslie make us posters of it!!!!!!
To make matters worse for me, the only LARGE store in the area(Walmart) has a three foot tall statue of Dobby from WarnerBrothers used as a promo item when the video was released. This thing is unbelievably real and its sits at the front entrance of the store. in a plastic cube. I’m in that store about 4 times a week and the only thing keeping me form steeling it is the fact that one of the three elementary schools in the county will win it for their library in a reading contest.
Believe me when I say if Robert’s school wins, Dobby will be comming to Niubus with me.
4 dave // May 29, 2003 at 8:58 am
Emily has tried real hard to get me to name my white Prius Albus, but I am resisting. Not that I don’t like the name, but this time, I am thinking of a Jane Austen name instead, “Bingley.”
See, her influence is still strong.
Here at my work, there are a few fellow engineers who have listened to Harry Potter while driving to work. One day when I took “You Know Who” to work, I got quite a laugh from one of them. He has asked me if I have driven “You Know Who” lately a number of times.
5 Dave // May 29, 2003 at 3:40 pm
The English word “prat” brings to mind a little Bytheway Family slang word that we use to mean prat. If it is not funny to you, I’m sorry, but at least us Bytheway’s can laugh at ourselves!
First, I found this on the internet:
The Wordwizard Clubhouse
prat
I heard the word pratfall used the other day and became curious about its origin. Random House Unabridged says that it is a fall in which one lands on the buttocks, often regarded as comical or humiliating; a humiliating blunder or defeat [1935–40; PRAT + FALL]. I then wondered where prat came from. I looked in several dictionaries (regular and slang) and found a whole bunch of meanings (both noun and verb). The one thing that most agreed upon, was that the word was of unknown origin (i.e. unknown Latin, Greek, … root), but that it did begin meaning buttocks in the 1500s (RH said 1550-70, M-W said 1530-69), and to push with the buttocks (“..pratted him away from the ticket window”), at some unspecified and presumably later date.
Back to the Bytheway’s
In years past, the term “prat fall” of course is a slapstick comedy move that used to just tickle my dad. However, in our church history we have two rather famous brothers with the last name of “Pratt.” My father, in his usual style, used to substitute the first name of one of these brothers, whose name was Orson Pratt, for the word prat. He would use it something like this: “He fell down on his Orson!”
It has become our standard family word now. So for example, when Ron calls Harry a prat after rescuing Fluer’s sister in GoF, we would, of course have called Harry an Orson!
6 Wolf550e // May 31, 2003 at 12:21 pm
Thanks for the list!
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